Stretching the bounds of typical fantasy races -OR- What makes an elf?

[David Johnston2]

I was amused by the dwarves from Dragon Age. You don't often see depictions of the dwarves as Klingons with longer beards.

[whswhs]

When I made up my latest batch of fantasy races, I was trying to take certain bits of lore and tie it to body size, typical build, relative brain size, original habitat, animal behavior analogy, and reproductive strategy and sexual dimorphism. That often added surprising bits to the original motifs. But what I seem to have retained was like this:

Dwarves: underground habitat, miners and craftsmen, small, women almost never seen

Elves: slender, forest habitat, musically gifted, long-lived, good climbers, dextrous

Ghouls: eat the dead (and therefore scavengers), combative, uncouth looks, crepuscular, desert habitat

Men: "man the mortal, master of horses," warlike, sexually dimorphic, plains dwellers and herders

Nixies: live in rivers, amphibious, small (with a bit of hobbit stirred in: peaceable, farmers, love beer)

Selkies: marine, affinities with seals, amazing swimmers, tribal

Trolls: huge, comfortable in the cold and dark/arctic or mountain habitat, males are brutal and dim, females are magical and clever, fairly solitary

Then on top of the resulting species traits I came up with several different cultural patterns for each species. For example, I have dwarves who have men coming to marry into the household of a dwarf woman and bring a dowry, and dwarves where men show that they can support their own household and offer a place in it to a dwarf woman; and in fact the latter culture plays a big part in the backstory of the setting.

[Randyman]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

In his Monster Hunter International books Larry Correia has trailer-park living elves. They're still connected to the supernatural but lithe, cultured and so on... not so much.

And thug gang gnomes... I've always thought he needed to add hillbilly redneck dwarves.

[Glimmerman]

I have borrowed ideas from Terminally Incoherent blog about Reinventing Fantasy Races: My Elves Are Different -
worth checking! Especially about hobbit sized feral elves.

Also from the same blog My Dwarfs are Different -
clockwork dwarves with memories on mithril punch cards.

[JohnLynch]

Originally Posted by Cowrie

if you say 'elf', most people are going to have a similar mental image: Slender, beautiful humanoid, probably fair-skinned and forest-dwelling with a penchant for archery, that is naturally agile, has an innate gift for magic, and is overall more skilled than humans.

However, what I want to know is, how far can you deviate from those typical norms for an entire race in a given setting, while still making it recognizable as an elf or dwarf or what-have-you and keeping the same name?

Here's something I quickly whipped together for elves. It keeps the core concept of elves while putting a twist on them:
Elf
Elves are migrants to the world of men, known to have travelled here aboard ships from the land of light. In truth this is a misunderstanding for elves travelled to the world aboard starships equipped with hyperspace drives from another star system. Shortly after establishing colonies, a terrible threat required the ship's return with the bulk of the soldiers who had accompanied the colonists. The idea was after the threat was dealt with the ship would return with much needed supplies. Alas the ship's never returned and no further word was ever receieved from the Elven home world.

Forced to fend for themselves, the elves struggled to get by. They were able to create the rudiments of alchemy, rediscovering gunpowder (an ancient form of technology used in more primitive times against wild beasts and other elves on their home world) and other basic technologies. When they made contact with gnomes they were able to learn the basics of magic which they adapted into their cities to create wonders undreamt of among the gnomish race, using magic as a replacement for more advanced technology.

Here's dwarves and gnomes from the same setting:
Dwarf
Dwarves live underground in cities where they work metal, create magical items and stand guard over magical portals to other worlds. They count among their number those who can channel the power of the gods and heal the injured. Such rites have been passed on to other races, including humans.

Unfortunately for the other races, the dwarves are losing the battle in guarding against the forces of other worlds who would invade. Many dwarven strongholds have fallen, causing them to be overrun by monsters who have then migrated to the surface world.

Some dwarven refugees have permanently set up residence in human cities. There they have established guilds and keep the secret of imbuing items with magical enchantments to themselves. They are a somewhat insular race and in the company of other dwarves speak their ancestral tongue.

Gnome
Gnomes live underground in subterranean cities. Masters of the arcane arts, they have traded their knowledge of the arcane with the other races, having taught dwarves how to create magical artifacts and elves how to cast spells. Six hundred years ago it became fashionable among the kings and queens of men to have gnome trained in magic as advisors who lavished gems and riches upon the gnomes to entice them. Sooner or later these gnomes were approached by a young lordling or lady who had an interest in the secrets of magic or who coveted the spot in the court held by the gnome. And so in this manner humans began to learn magic.

Gnomes are quite rare these days. With the dwarven cities falling to the monstrous hoardes the Underways which connect the subterranean gnomish cities with the surface are becoming much more dangerous to travel. As such gnomish cities are becoming isolated from each other with those gnomes on the surface stranded from their homes.
----
Kobolds (or maybe goblins?) would take the archetypical place of hobbits in the setting while humans would be extremely medieval with the dwarves introducing such advancements as full plate and elves would start to be a territorial problem as more and more human kingdoms are established and the wilderness becomes more populated with monsters.

[Wonazer]

My approach to this was the result of a player, back in D&D3.x days, asking a question about a dwarf being raised by non-dwarves and if their racial traits would change because of it. It's something that has stuck with me over the years. According to GURPS Fantasy, every Orc has a bad temper and every dwarf is greedy. I don't like this approach, so I handled it differently.

For my campaign, I had three points I wanted to cover when it came to non-human races and their templates.

1. Keep it manageable.
2. Keep it recognizable.
3. It should make sense.

I didn't want to overwhelm myself with tons of options, so I kept the list of player races relatively small. I have enough to worry about and remember. That led to me worrying about what the players would have to manage.

I didn't want to spend a ton of time (in-game and out) educating players on my spiffy new races or alterations to the expected tropes (and reminding them regularly), so I tried to keep the common fantasy races normal-ish. If I tell the players they're interacting with a dwarf, the common assumptions should apply.

But, I wanted it to make sense. What, genetically, makes an elf an elf? At the same time, what culturally makes a dwarf a dwarf? Further, what if a human or dwarf were raised -- from birth to adulthood -- in an elven society? Certainly, they wouldn't inherit the genetic traits of the elves, but the cultural norms should be impressed upon them.

With that in mind, I came up with Racial and Cultural templates for each of the major non-human race/cultures. They're what you would expect from the tropes, but they can be applied in odd ways with the right backstory. I even took it a step further and made it so each of the four major races in my world (Human, Elf, Dwarf, and Orc) could interbreed (with their own genetic templates), but every half-breed is sterile (like mules).

So, I didn't "stretch" the bounds of the typical fantasy races. I tried to take the existing tropes and make them work in unique ways.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Wonazer

According to GURPS Fantasy, every Orc has a bad temper and every dwarf is greedy.

Well, unless they buy it off or, in the case of NPCs, simply don't have it because the GM says so. It's the just default state of orc-ness or dwarf-ness. You're not locked into your racial template unless the GM rules that you are.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Wonazer

My approach to this was the result of a player, back in D&D3.x days, asking a question about a dwarf being raised by non-dwarves and if their racial traits would change because of it. It's something that has stuck with me over the years. According to GURPS Fantasy, every Orc has a bad temper and every dwarf is greedy. I don't like this approach, so I handled it differently.

You would be entirely justified in rating those as cultural issues - recalling that the GURPS system uses a mythical "human norm" as a baseline. Orcs are "bad tempered" because their culture places a low value on impulse control and encourages displays of "strong" emotions like anger (we get similar - if less extreme - levels of dissonance between real world human cultures ... even more so over time), Dwarves are "greedy" because their culture places a far higher emphasis on material wealth as a measure of personal status. Or you could consider it all genetic - although that idea doesn't appeal much to me either.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Tolkien was only going back to the ideas of elves in older English sources, before the Victorian Age shrunk them into Tinkerbell-pixies. He did not invent this. He also did not invent the "like you but better" idea, which also comes from old English sources.

He was basically just rejecting Victorian fairies. All the other stuff was already there; he just gave them background context.

I've tended to consider his elves divergent from their source material in not being a pack of terrifyingly unpredictable psychopaths ... I grant you the reversion from the Victorian nonsense, but he's still a long way from most Anglo-Scottish mythos, likewise Scandinavian Troll-lore. I suppose if he had been aiming for Irish Tuatha we might have a point ... because they match his elves reasonably well.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Wonazer

My approach to this was the result of a player, back in D&D3.x days, asking a question about a dwarf being raised by non-dwarves and if their racial traits would change because of it. It's something that has stuck with me over the years. According to GURPS Fantasy, every Orc has a bad temper and every dwarf is greedy. I don't like this approach, so I handled it differently

So do I.

However my Orcs are still Bad Tempered, Berserk, and Impulsive because that is genetic, and the Cultural template adds on Social Stigma (Savage) and makes the previous Disads worse.

With that in mind, I came up with Racial and Cultural templates for each of the major non-human race/cultures.

Ditto. Except I do Cultural template by region/cultural rather than race*.


* Occasionally, yes the majority of a culture will be one race, but it is rare in my fantasy world.

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Wonazer

My approach to this was the result of a player, back in D&D3.x days, asking a question about a dwarf being raised by non-dwarves and if their racial traits would change because of it. It's something that has stuck with me over the years. According to GURPS Fantasy, every Orc has a bad temper and every dwarf is greedy. I don't like this approach, so I handled it differently.

Odd. What version of GURPS Fantasy Folk did you look at? I don't remember GURPS liking that approach either. :D

I no longer have a copy of the book handy, but I recall it not working how you say. Instead, the flexibility of the Racial Templates was up to the GM, with recommendations that biological traits be far less flexible than social traits, and alterations to both needed to have logical justifications and consequences e.g. you could be blessed or crippled by having/lacking something typical of members of your race but everything would have to be adjusted accordingly and one had to pay for it all.

As you mention it later in your post (in the chunk I decided not to quote), I also favored allowing much hybridization between the races in my setting, with the culture of origin presenting additional lenses for the template. Hybrids were usually fertile but the more you thinned the bloodlines, the more you approached a baseline human; players couldn't try to create their own custom package through 20 generations of selective breeding. Unless you wanted to justify traits you didn't really need such a background to have. XD